A Letter to My Young Self

One observation I note when people are talking about their career development is the reflection that early in their career they focused on the technical elements of development in relation to their discipline, whereas later they focused on more practical “things they did not teach you” about your chosen discipline or career.

I have reflected on this and there are things I wish I knew at the beginning of career about working as a client-side researcher that I have learnt through experience. I have put these things in a letter to my young self.

Dear Simon,

As you move through your career as a client-side researcher, you should seek to understand and deepen your levels of knowing on these four things.

Your job is synthesizing research & evidence, not being a research buyer.

Organizations today have many sources of market intelligence, including internally generated data and externally collected (including respondent self-report). Your role is to understand what all these sources are saying about the business & customer problems you are researching. Your internal clients are looking at all the information, if you are not, then you are at a disadvantage. 

The amount of data and evidence on customer behavior is multiplying requiring the use of synthesis methods to draw inference. This skill in the past has been more limited to the domain of academic literature reviews. Researchers need these skills. 

When you commission research, it should factor in everything you know about the research questions you have assembled from your synthesis, if it does not, you will just be re-discovering what you already know. 

To do synthesis well, you need to use frameworks, methodologies, and hierarchies of evidence. These will help you distill the signals from noise.

The “So what” of this point on synthesis is that good synthesis will ensure that your work is high quality and seen as high quality.

Credit: ivcandy

Understand the Desirability, Feasibility and Viability triangle! 

Desirability is the extent to which the thing you are researching is desired by the customer, and would they buy it or use it? This is a fundamental question as client-side Researchers we are often assessing. Will customers buy the product? Will they keep using the product? Do they like the experience? Is the experience easy for them to do? How satisfied are they with the product and experience? These are all desirability questions.

There are two other things, just as important as desirability that your internal clients are also trying to assess. They are:

1. Feasibility: Can we practically and technically do or provide this? 
2. Viability: Can it be provided at a cost so that the customer and shareholders can benefit.

The “So what” of this is that your internal clients are balancing these alongside desirability. 

Things that are desirable from your research might not be feasible and or viable. Or it might take substantial innovation to fit the feasibility and viability envelope. 

Many times, when I have observed frustration on behalf of Researchers about results not being implemented or “internal politics” getting in the way, usually at the centre of the matter is different views or blockers around about viability and/or feasibility. 

Another blocker, increasingly more common is prioritization. Businesses, no matter how big or small, have many things they could do relative to the resources and bandwidth to act, meaning only a small number of projects or ideas can be implemented. This comes back to understanding viability. With ever increasing amounts of feedback from customers about what needs to change, only a small portion of ideas can be actioned. 

Researchers that do not understand this may be perceived as not having great business acumen.

Always Keep up!

With the world rapidly changing, what constitutes the skills required to be a Researcher also evolves. All Researchers need to keep these skills current!

From a technical craft perspective, consider:

1. Digital innovation has transformed qualitative research. While the skills of being able to conduct in person qual are still relevant, doing qual remotely requires additional and different sets of skills to be able to use and make the most of the innovative technology. 
2. Most customer experiences are now digital which have different measurement paradigms and constructs not covered in traditional qual and quant research. 

From a business and organizational perspective, consider:

1. The impact of various economic trends on businesses and industries necessitates the need to improve efficiency. The availability of technically skilled people in cheaper labour markets and spectre of AI mean that all Researchers need to understand the specific areas in which they add-value and keep current their own “value proposition”.
2. Organizations are adopting agile ways of working as their businesses increasingly become more digitally focused, meaning you must become familiar with these ways of working. You need to understand how the research project lifecycle fits in these new ways of working.
3. With these new ways of working comes other disciplines into the mix which will require the need to use mixed methodologies to cater to the other paradigms. 

On this topic, I could go on and on! I think the “so what” of this point is obvious.

Credit: metamoreworks

Sponsorship is important!

This is a very nuanced issue and brevity will help. Calling it “sponsorship” is an exaggeration, but aids in understanding. As you go about your career as a Researcher, stakeholders you deal with regularly will begin to rely on you for your input on specific topics.

As they move onto more senior roles, you may find they will look to you for support in taking your services with them into their new ventures. This might be a new job in the same organization, or a new organization. It might just be a recommendation of you to one of their colleagues.

The development of these relationships is important for career progression. 

Do you know who your career sponsors might be? Who seems to benefit from your excellent work? Who relies on your expertise? As the sponsors career needs change, so does the importance of specific advisors and input. This means that sponsorship can end. Your sponsors will evolve over time.

The “So what” of this point is obvious, but there is a part 2 to this point that is more subtle. Sometimes (perhaps a lot?), you are delivering unwelcome news as part of your research job. It is important therefore to retain your objectivity and stay true to the insights.

You will however need to frame your results and recommendations in a relationship context rather than “blunt assessments”. Be mindful of the context in which stakeholders are operating (see desirability, feasibility, and viability) and be sure to give them good “So what’s” and “Now what’s” to help them with their options.